Kuss Quartett / Mojca Erdmann

Born in 1936 in Berlin, composer Aribert Reimann – himself a creator of numerous Lied compositions and also a subtle Lied accompanist as a pianist – repeatedly devoted time to the romantic Lied. In this concert, soprano Mojca Erdmann and the Kuss Quartett present two of Reimann’s adaptations of romantic Lieder. Reimann adapted Robert Schumann’s Six Songs Op. 107 – composed four years before his death – for soprano and string quartet, following Schumann’s conviction that the singing voice and piano alone cannot “express everything; apart from the expression of the whole, even subtle nuances of the poem shall become apparent”. With “… or does it mean death?” Reimann adapted eight Lieder and a fragment for soprano and string quartet that Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy had composed based on poems by Heinrich Heine, and connected them cyclically with six intermezzi based on Mendelssohn’s music. In this concert, Reimann’s compository reflexions on romantic Lied music will be placed in context with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s String Quartet in C Major KV 465 as well as with Helmut Lachenmann’s String Quartet No. 3, in relation to which the composer once wrote: “Pathways in art don’t lead anywhere and most certainly not to a ‘destination’. For this goal is nowhere else but here – where friction between the creative will and its processes turns the familiar into the foreign …”